Lynette bends to hug Robbie, who sits at the kitchen table with his coffee. She’s just woken up, and her cotton nightie still smells of their bed. “I dreamed I was grabbed by a huge white worm and dragged into a hole,” she says. “It was horrible.”
He strokes her shoulders, feeling like he should pull her onto his lap and comfort her, but the space between the wall and the kitchen table is too narrow. “Jeez. Did you get away?”
She straightens, brushing the tangled hair out of her face. “Yes, but I didn’t want to tell anyone what happened. I knew that once I did, my life would never be the same. People would always see me differently.”
“Because they wouldn’t believe you?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I just knew they wouldn’t see me the same.” She goes to the sink and fills a glass with cold water. “It was back in the old neighborhood. You know that vacant lot behind the Food Lion? That’s where it grabbed me, and it dragged me into this hole, but then it fell asleep.” She looks pale and disoriented. “And I dreamed that Lily told me she saw this thing, just a few days before, only I didn’t believe her.”
Lily is Lynette’s daughter from her first marriage. She’s spending the summer in Phoenix with her dad.
“She saw it first?” Robbie asks.
“She said she saw it at this house in the neighborhood. The people there had a toy poodle, super cute, but it disappeared. The people were strange. They had these security bars over all the windows on the first floor, really ugly. Like maybe they knew about the danger, but wouldn’t tell anybody? Anyway, Lily saw this worm thing, clinging on the bars over their window, and it was looking inside.”
She shudders. “It was big, like, as big around as a leg.” She curves her two hands around the top of her thigh to show the size of it. Robbie sees how white her thighs have gotten, so white the veins are traced in blue under her skin. She never wears skirts or shorts anymore, because of the varicose veins. He pictures the worm as something white like that, with bulges of swollen, meandering vein under the skin.
“I dreamed I wouldn’t let her tell anyone,” Lynette says. “I said, ‘Honey, I really don’t think that’s what you saw.’ Is that, like, one of those things where you don’t let your kid tell anyone if they’ve been sexually abused? It’s creepy, if it is.”
Robbie shakes his head. “It’s all this stuff about abuse on TV. That’s how it got into your dream. And then you saw this worm yourself, right? But you got away.”
“Yeah, but I was afraid to tell anyone. And I knew I had to, because all our friends lived around there and they all had little kids. Doreen lives right across the street from that vacant lot, and she has three little boys.”
Robbie hasn’t thought about Doreen for a long time. A good-looking redhead, or dyed red, anyway. Her husband left her for some woman he met at a marketing conference. Hard to see what was wrong with Doreen.
“So then I dreamed we were having this cookout for all our friends, and I was trying to decide if I should tell them,” Lynette says. “And things kept going wrong, like there was something wrong with the plumbing. And apparently one of our neighbors was Chris Evans, you know, that actor from Captain America? And he thought he knew something about plumbing, but he only made it worse.”
So my wife is having dreams about Chris Evans working on the plumbing, Robbie thinks. That’s your white worm for you. He feels his own cock, lying limp in his pajama pants, and has a pang of guilt. “So how did you get away from the white worm?”
“I don’t know, exactly. It had me down in this hole, all wrapped around me up to my neck, but it was asleep. And I could see the light up at the top of the hole, so it wasn’t very deep. And I wanted to unwrap myself and get away, but I was afraid I’d wake it up. Isn’t that like some existentialism thing, where you have to take some action, but you’re afraid you’ll just make it worse?”
She still looks unsettled, standing by the sink, and Robbie thinks again that he should get up and put his arms around her. He sees her white legs and the blown-out veins that mean she won’t be able to work for much longer as a sales associate because she can’t be on her feet all day. She’s going to have to try and find something in an office. There’s another moment when he could hug her, but he misses it.
“I just got away,” she says. “I don’t know how, exactly, but then we were having this cookout and all our friends from the old neighborhood were there, and it was all these smart, funny women like Amy Schumer and Tina Fey. And I couldn’t figure out how I was going to tell them.”
They had a lot more friends in the old neighborhood, Robbie thinks. They hardly know anyone here, just the guys from work. They’re all younger and don’t have kids, so it doesn’t mesh somehow. And the job isn’t what he thought it would be.
The guys at work brag about the women they fuck, while he hangs limp. And his wife has varicose veins and dreams about Chris Evans. Instead of friends, she has snarky women that she watches on TV.
“Maybe if you could remember,” Robbie says. “If you could just try to remember how you got away, maybe it wouldn’t be so scary.”
Corey Flintoff is a former foreign correspondent for NPR. His assignments included Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Ukraine. His most recent posting was as NPR’s bureau chief in Moscow, where he and his family spent four years. Flintoff’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Glimmer Train. His story Early Stages won first place in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Contest in 2017. He currently lives in Maryland.